Posts written by Susan Waugh

New Zealand has an amazing diversity of seabirds. Around 1/3 of the worlds 348 species are found in New Zealand waters, with a high number of endemic and threatened species among them. Te Papa has a long-term research programme on Westland Petrels, a species that nests in the coastal cliffs near Punakaiki, on the West… Read more »

The work on little penguins around Wellington continues, now that most of the nesting pairs have one or two chicks to feed. This week Te Papa scientists and helpers from various disciplines on the Te Papa staff have been putting out loggers on the chick-rearing penguins, both in Evan’s Bay and Day’s Bay. Our previous… Read more »

Work continues at Motuara Island on the little penguin foraging behaviour. The nesting penguins are mainly on chicks at this stage of the breeding cycle, although some birds have re-nested and are now incubating new eggs. Caroline Bost, the French intern working with Te Papa this summer, has been stationed out on Motuara Island in… Read more »

This blog was written by Caroline Bost, Te Papa Intern on the little penguin project, with help from volunteers Blandine Jurie and Yukiko Shimada for text and images: Here is a bit of news about our first fieldwork week on Motuara Island. Motuara Island is an island located in the Queen Charlotte Sound (New Zealand), at… Read more »

Since we blogged 2 weeks ago, the Te Papa team working on little penguins has started a second front of activity in Marlborough, based at Motuara Island in Queen Charlotte Sound. Almost all of the birds from the Wellington Harbour nests have had their tags retrieved, and are going to either locations within the harbour or… Read more »

Every year, Te Papa hosts a number of research interns, and this year we’ve very lucky to have Caroline Bost working with us in the Natural History research group. She’s a young researcher from France who’s working on penguin biology. Over the next few months she’ll be unpicking some of the mysteries of the elusive,… Read more »

Today we’ve been hearing about the most recent addition to Te Papa’s scientific collections, a new colossal squid Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. We’re playing host to a dozen or so media representatives as well as our own live-streaming film crew, who are following intently the activity of five visiting squid scientists from AUT, led by Dr Kat… Read more »

Recent work on Ohinau Island, Coromandel reinforced for me how fine the boundary is between the sciences. We were working on the biology of shearwaters nesting at an important historical site for Ngati Hei, an iwi from the eastern Coromandel. The island has been inhabited in the past, and was an important food gathering site… Read more »

Keeping track of our protected species populations and their distribution is one of the tasks of biologists, and this summer Te Papa scientists surveyed sites in the Mercury Islands group for seabird populations. Flesh-footed shearwaters Puffinus carneipes breed throughout northern New Zealand, with a total population size in New Zealand of about 10,000 to 15,000 pairs… Read more »

I’m Mathilde Meheut, a French biology student travelling in New Zealand who had the chance to do some voluntary work at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. In this blog, I’ll tell you about some of the work I got involved in at Te Papa during a few weeks in June and July… Read more »